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Abstract

Concepts and heritage items within a society are constantly transforming. One example is the debate of how the institutional marriage appears in modern society: between one man and one woman, people of the same sex/gender or even not linked to sex/gender or a specific number of people at all. In Germany this process of configuration came to a (temporary) end in 2017. However, such changes of heritage items in society can be traced within use of language as the most important medium of communication by linguistic studies. The present study aims to show how these agonal attempts of configuration appear with respect to digital communicative settings. Using the pilot corpus from the EFFI-Project (Ehe und Familie in der Flagship Initiativ "Transforming Cultural Heritage), which is in fact a thematic Twitter-based corpus of the discourse about the concept marriage, the analysis reveals the shape of the agonal configuration of marriage in this discourse domain. Apart from an account of the evolution of marriage in Germany, as well as basic discussions on discourse linguistics, texts in the internet and digital linguistics, this carried by [1] outlining the ongoing Semantic Competitions (Semantische Wettkämpfe) on [2] the famous Micro-Blogging-Network Twitter. Examining typical digital ways of communication (posting links, pictures or memes) that exist in the reviewed Twitter data secondary, no specific digital appearance of Semantic Competitions can be found as stated in the further hypothesis of this study. Most Semantic Competitions work similar to analog ones, but with extended possibilities.